Day Twelve

Yeah, I missed a post yesterday but today we’ve got both the status update post I always try to do but also a post about returning to university. It sadly lacked the wonderful image of Durham Cathedral you can see out of the front door, or a few over the water, because a) the weather was crap yesterday and b) being late to a lecture is not a good time to carry a camera around and start snapping pictures.

Today, I managed a significant amount of pages and wrote the scene that precedes the initial catalyst for alll of the events of the novel. So that was major. Even if the scene itself appears only as a self-contained event, it has consequences, so that was fun to write. Surprisingly so. Especially since what I wrote on my index card planning the scene had the words ‘need to make this more than simply filler’ on.

It’s strange, because I wrote that only three weeks ago at most, around two or three days before Christmas I’d imagine, and it is so inaccurate I’m impressed. This scene, rather than being filler, because of the twist I blogged about discovering a few days ago, is now vitally important.

One of the characters that was key to the discussion on the scene card has also been completely eradicated. She no longer exists in the world of the story. Prior to making that change her existence was crucial to the plot but then she became superfluous and even caused plot holes because her influence in the story contradicted some of the cornerstones of my character’s identity as she saw it. So she’s gone. One of the writing books I read over the vacation did mention that sometimes characters have to be removed but I never expected it to happen so quickly or to be so painless. Adding her may have retained another level of depth to the book but then there would be the issue of retaining that subplot when there are already some pretty important issues that need to be discussed and relationships to be explored… There most likely would not be room for that.

Being back at university has enabled me to write much more freely and although quite frankly the trip to the DSU to write was pretty painful — the overwhelming noise at times made it hard to concentrate — it allowed me to fall into the minds of my characters. If I hadn’t been there then I would have been sitting in my room in college watching T.V. A day with four hours of teaching time was never going to be the day I started my first essay of the term. Tomorrow however will be.

I’ve just been watching episode two of the second series of Broadchurch and I cannot quite decide how I feel about it. I felt let down, perhaps because it didn’t have the who-dunnit quality of the previous series. It is something I know that I could write a whole post on some time and maybe I will, because I love discussing shows.

Especially my mum and my granda always say that I never shut up when TV is on and it may be interesting to discuss Broadchurch. Something else that may be interesting to discuss — but through a long post — would be all of the problems my sister and I had with the film The Other Boleyn Girl when we watched it. Now that would be interesting, although very time consuming. I might put the idea to her actually!

It’s late and I promised myself an early night but that’s not going to happen now. I have a lecture at 10am in the morning but luckily it is on an actually interesting topic; the ‘English in America’ and that at least sounds exciting! After that I will be reading about Medieval Queenship for most of the day but that is tomorrow.

I’ll sign off with the statistics of my progress:

Scene four was intended to be one scene…. It expanded into two scenes, which have been dubbed 4.1 and 4.2 so that I can understand where I am on my outline.

Today I was working on scene 4.2 which until today was exactly one side of A4 long, which was the sum progress of Saturday and Sunday. Today the scene was finished — with notes in the margins on improvements for the next draft as I didn’t have my notebook with me — and it is now just over fourteen pages long; meaning that I wrote around thirteen pages today. I’m not sure if that is as yet a record or not but I am still oddly impressed with the little stack of yellow paper I am collecting.

Total page count? Ignoring the one scene that is on the computer, I have sixty-six pages (that’s if counting single sided) complete. At a conservative estimate of 200 words per page that is over 13,000 words. AND unlike the early drafts abandoned on the computer in between Girl With A Thousand Faces and this, I can’t wait to make it better.